George Kennan and Henry Kissinger had much in common. They served their country as diplomats and policy formulators — Kennan as a foreign service officer and director of the State Department’s policy planning staff; Kissinger as national security adviser and…
On July 27, 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, and the guns fell silent for the first time in three years on the Korean Peninsula. The armistice effectively restored the status quo ante to the peninsula that had been…
In 1946, George Kennan, the U.S. Charge D’Affaires in Moscow, sent an 8,000 word telegram to the State Department warning of Joseph Stalin’s aggressive foreign policy. The following year, writing under the pseudonym “Mister X,” he reiterated his warning in…
George F. Kennan was a diplomat, historian, geopolitician, strategist, writer, public intellectual, professor, farmer, and introspective diarist. He lived a very long life — he died at the age of 101 in 2005. His ideas helped shape the course of…
The Washington Post columnist George Will surveys recent world events and proclaims that the “correlation of world forces” has shifted substantially against Russia and China. He attributes this shift to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — which he calls a “spectacular…
News reports indicate that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war. Kyiv officials have proposed a UN mediated “peace summit,” which Russia appears to have rejected. Now in his 99th year, Henry Kissinger, writing…
In November 1982, Richard Pipes, on loan from Harvard University to President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, was putting the finishing touches on what would become National Security Decision Directive 75 (NSDD-75), the strategic blueprint for winning the Cold…
As China’s President Xi Jinping is about to become his country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong during the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th annual party congress, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has written an important article in Foreign Affairs…
With the formation of the Sino-Russian strategic alliance, the world has witnessed the near completion of a diplomatic revolution that may change the global balance of power. This development in some respects echoes the diplomatic revolution of 1756 (when Austria…
